The Fedora Project have announced the immediate availability of Fedora 8, codenamed Werewolf.

The new release includes PulseAudio, which I covered recently, new Fedora Custom Spins, where you can download a pre-built Fedora image with the packages you want, Codec Buddy for easy playback of media which Fedora doesn't support out of the box (such as proprietary formats) and many more updates and enhancements.

There can be no hiding it - audio frameworks on Linux are far from perfect. To start with, we have several different sound servers - including OSS and ALSA, which complicates things for application developers, but also, these frameworks aren't nearly as advanced in terms of feature sets as the sound systems in other operating systems like Core Audio in Mac OS X and Windows Vista's sound architecture.